[spoiler alert: do not read if you have not seen the film!]
American Beauty 1999
Director: Sam Mendes
This is a disturbing film for an American audience, a
ten-years-later evocation of the kind of confrontation with unease and the
possibility of psychopathological manifestations that viewers might have
remembered from Steven Sonderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), and feeling disturbed was exactly my reaction
to reading its partial plot summary. I’m thankful that after more than ten
years I finally rented and actually saw the film. It is a superb film about film, about cinema
as art and theater, and the satiric darkness framed by the protagonist’s
voiceover actually reaches tragedy.
These are just my immediate and uninformed impressions, but I hope to
convince others to re-visit it.
We are told early on, by the disembodied voice of Lester
Burnham (Kevin Spacey), that within some
near time of the narrative he will be dead.
We are positioned as audience much like the audience of Greek tragedy:
we sense that we may know this story but it has a strange effect, our hearing
this: are humans or the gods of fate in control? We know this place as well:
American suburbia and its nuclear families, each one, it turns out, a House of
Atreus ( or Laius, more likely).
Excellent camera work, with the scenes of the tense non-marriage
of Lester and his wife (with his daughter at meals filmed from a distance),
frames the dining room of the perfected McMansion, and reveals the selves that they
perform over and over again. Brilliantly, Carolyn Burnham (Annette Bening) is
overtly wearing her mask as drama queen- in this case a perfect phrase- and
continues to insert near-comic parodies of the toxic American blend of a thirst
for success and self-improvement with deep insecurity. The prescience of the
film is somewhat uncanny in that it was made before either 9/11 or the housing
bubble that precipitated the financial crisis of nearly ten years later. But
the ingredients are all there: greed and a materialism that has no idea what
the actual world might convey if one stopped and looked. American beauty here
is a projected mask.
Lester’s adolescent self and the constructed identities of
the ex-Marine neighbor who abuses his own son- all of these unconscious
enactments are arranged to play out as unrecognized theater. Only the abused boy next door, Ricky, and the naïve but wide-eyed Jane, Lester’s daughter, start to see the possibility of framing life as art- not to escape,
but better to understand the pathologies
of their parents and friends and, most importantly, of themselves.
Mendes uses windows and mirrors in a brilliant way. They are
framed paintings. They reveal and conceal crucial information that brings down
the world of fantasy on the head of Lester, quite literally. Ricky’s video
camera focuses on Jane in a circle of her mirrored image through the bedroom
window, moving past and ignoring the dominant image of her friend; it is a focus that is reminiscent of paintings by Petrus
Christus or van Eyck. Mendes’s circles enclose so many social themes of
American pathology, familiar from Dr.
Strangelove (the covertly gay military homophobe) and from the many real
manifestations of manic hedonism: drugs, guns, child abuse and a ghastly satire
of self –help and business management coaching. Don’t be a victim: get a
gun! Have an affair with the Real Estate
King. Of course wife Carolyn is a real estate salesperson and Lester is in
advertising. The latter blurs the lines between cinema and desire, and our
hero’s life comes to depend on the
ability to separate them so that real beauty can be revealed.
Ricky becomes a boyfriend of Jane and he is revealed to be a video maker, and one who finally sees the unseen side
of objects, the beauty he can capture in cinema, the falling and swirling
leaves with a plastic bag:
Ricky
Fitts: It was one of those days when it's a minute away from
snowing and there's
this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it. Right?
And this bag was just
dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it.
For
fifteen minutes. That's the day I realized that there was this entire life
behind things,
and
this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know
there
was no reason to be afraid, ever. Video's a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me
remember...
I need to remember... Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world,
I
feel like I can't take it, and my heart is just going to cave in.
Lester’s daughter
Jane sees her fantasies of hatred and revenge on video and can in fact see that
she does not really want to enact them. “You know I’m kidding, right?” is how
she takes off quickly the mask of contract murder.
Tragically, her newly, or perhaps always, adolescent father
moves, as many a tragic hero, closer to his fate, but just as he does, we do in fact pity him and see someone else behind the irresponsible and cynical
jerk. That he allows ex-Marine Fitts to hug him, accepting his humanity and
need for comfort even though he does not know until seconds later the reason
for his distress, marks him as having a source of that same ability, like
Ricky’s, to perceive something as it
really is. His reaction to the kiss is not even one of anger but of gentle
correction.
The crisis, the critical scene of enacting his sexual
fantasy of making love at last to the teenage girl and friend of his
daughter’s, is surely what sealed Spacey’s Oscar: we finally see the scared little
girl behind the masked, pretend siren that the audience – but not Lester- has
been rolling its eyes at, perhaps, in amused disgust. His recognition, classically his true anagnorisis, is to move from projection at last to perception, to see her as she really
is: a little girl like his own daughter, needing protection and not exploitation. But the Fates have wound the threads already
tightly around his life, and the other revelation by the self-hating Fitts will
not be redemptive but instead an engine of death. His voiceover even repeats a truth about our not knowing who is fortunate
until after death, an ancient Greek maxim repeated in Herodotus, Histories, Book I, 32.(Loeb, Godley,
1975 p. 39).
Lester recalls at death, at the seconds of his murder, his
own real perceptions of childhood before adolescence itself became his mask. He
also could see the unseen side of things, and this is what Mendes seems to me
to suggest cinematic art can reveal if we can see it through a film like this,
a series of still photographs, not unlike the one that seems to radiate for the
first time an unseen joy in the seconds before he is shot. And this brings us
inevitably to the other tale of nymphet obsession and reductive
objectification, Nabokov’s Lolita.
She is back, but this time, fiction is not the danger. It is rather the means
to revelation of what was false. Lester sees the photograph and, too late, his
real situation in an adult life. Too late, he finds it not only true, but
beautiful.
